There comes a moment in the lives of those of us with children, where we, for a fleeting fleshly second, speak into the open air the question, “why do we have to care so much?” One of these moments had arisen in our home recently when we were evaluating the decision to allow a certain book to be consumed by our eager readers. It is laborious, frankly, to have convictions; to ascertain what is the author’s intent, what is the message being preached, and whether or not the reader is equipped to sift through a secular worldview and hold it up to the candle of truth. When these moments come, we are tempted to be envious of the hoards of parents whose thermometer is an age-graded rating acceptance. Wouldn’t it be easier if we didn’t care so much? Wouldn’t it be so nice to sit and enjoy a movie without spending the length of the end-credits dissecting it’s value?

The short and long answer to this temptation is, of course, a hard no. The cost of apathy is far to high, and the accountability that we have as parents is, of course, huge. I recently read an article admonishing its readers to give full meaning to the phrase “Christ-centered”. Much like the words “love” or “awesome”, whose meanings have been sanded down to be broad and catholic, “Christ-centered”, although, generally good, tends to lack it’s extensive properties. Our school in general can be Christ-centered, but is our forty-five minutes of phonics Christ-centered? Or the thirty minutes of recess? Are our children pointed to Christ when they discover what a star is made of? Do we approach each and every encounter with our students and families holding fast to the only rock that is the surety of our not drowning?

If we are searching for the easy way out, the path of least resistance, and the total abandon in recreation, then we can be sure that, although easy now, these tablets that we fail to hang up on our doorposts will crash down upon our heads when our children are older. We miss out on so much when we expect little from our children. They are big eaters, so let’s give them hearty food.